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Miriam's cup - the begining
Contributed by Gina Volynsky

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Miriam's Cup

As we know from Torah and midrash, and as the liquid in her cup attests, the Prophet Miriam, sister of Moshe Rabeinu, our teacher, and Aharon, the first high priest, has always been associated with water.  It was Miriam who defied the Pharaoh’s death sentence for male Hebrew infants, who placed baby Moses in the basket in the River Nile, a kind of birth canal that delivered him to the Pharaoh’s daughter who found and adopted him, assuring his survival. 

It was Miriam who, at the shore of the Red Sea, “took a timbrel in her hand and all the women followed her, with timbrels and with dancing.” And who “sang to them,” leading them through the parted waters, not with hesitation and fear but with music and dancing.  Perhaps taking a cue from Miriam, a few millennia later the Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman famously said, “If there’s no dancing, it’s not my revolution.” But it was our foremother Miriam who introduced the notion of radical change as worthy of celebration.

It was because of the merit of Miriam that a miraculous well traveled with the Israelites, slaking their thirst during forty years in the desert.  After Miriam died, there was no water. God instructed Moses to speak to a rock, asking it for water, as perhaps Miriam had sung and spoken to the land they were traversing, asking it for water.  Instead of speaking to the rock, Moses struck it — producing water but also God’s wrath sufficient to deny him entry into the Promised Land. A warning to us: like Miriam, address the Earth as our comrade, rather than making it our slave – or we will lose the Earth itself, our Promised Land.

Miriam is powerfully linked to all three water sources – river, sea, and well — for good reason. Just as without water there would be no life on earth, without Miriam, there would be no Jewish life.  Before he could lead us out of Mitzrayim, Moses had to be kept alive. We have Miriam’s Nile rescue plan to thank for his survival. Without Miriam’s song and dance, there would have been no life-enhancing celebration of our redemption.  Without Miriam’s Well, we would not have lived through our wanderings. 

The wine with which we fill Elijah’s Cup anticipates the bliss of the future.  The water we place in Miriam’s Cup celebrates life itself, the miracle of joy in the present, and the basic fact of Jewish survival.  A people needs both, but water comes before wine. Without water, there can  be  no wine.  Without Miriam, we would have no future.
haggadah Section: Introduction

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